aredridel

When vacant Blitz-bombed lots were still a thing: tiny wildflowers. —@GreatDismal

I was thinking this morning about how many great moments slip through the cracks, cracks in horrors and tragedies like the London Blitz, cracks in our own attention, moments that go unnoticed, the little changes leading up to a change in season.

@GreatDismal flowers growing on slate roofs overrun with moss. And our of the cracks in a stone wall 300+ years old—@strixus

Even the replies go there. Cracks. Things pushing up where we imagine they have no business.

I sometimes write about a fictional world that doesn't have a lot of room for cracks, metaphorical or otherwise. What would your life be like without any cracks?

This is a red velvet cake made in a WW2 era way, using beets for moisture and color. The trick to getting good color rather than mud is to keep the batter acidic: lemon and buttermilk and a complete lack of alkaline leavening are what make this recipe unusual.

Boil two medium beets and puree. (You need one cup)

Cream two sticks of butter with a cup of sugar. Beat in two eggs as completely as you can.

Mix two tablespoons of lemon juice with 3/4 cup buttermilk. Add a cup of the beet puree.

In a bowl, mix a cup of flour and a quarter cup of natural (non-Dutch process) cocoa powder. (I used Hershey’s).

Beat the three mixtures together, adding some of the butter, egg and sugar mixture alternating with some of the beet and buttermilk mixture.

Pour into greased cupcake pans and bake at 350 until a toothpick or straw comes out clean.

This will be a soft, moist cake, almost custard. It released from the pan easily for me, though my cupcake pans are cast iron and a little unusual.

I used most of my batter as a layer under a cheesecake, but that’s a story for another time.

Mirrored from All Confirmation Bias, All The Time.

Cayenne and Sweet Onion Hot Sauce

8 large (15 cm, 8 in) ripe red cayenne peppers, roasted over a flame (or in an oven)
3 medium onions, baked in their skins at 120 °C (250 °F) for 1 hour.
40 g brown sugar (5 tsp)
25 ml apple cider vinegar
a splash of orange juice or a little zest
a little salt

Scrape the blackened skin from the cayennes, though be careful not to lose too much flesh. Strip away seeds and cords if you want to tame the heat a bit.

Peel the onions, leaving only the browned flesh.

Run the whole pile through the food processor.

If you want to preserve for a longer term, add 2g citric acid, and omit the orange juice.

Chop four slices of bacon and start cooking them over medium heat.

Chop one small onion, three small carrots, two sticks of celery.

Add them to the cooking bacon, with the fat.

Let them cook until the onions start to go transparent.

Add a cup or two of beer.

Add 3 or 4 fingerling potatoes, cut into small bite sized pieces.

Add water to cover and let this simmer until the potatoes are soft.

Chop four or five small squid into half-inch square pieces. Tentacles can be left in larger pieces.

Put these in a pan with a few tablespoons of melted butter. Cook briefly until the squid firms. (Ten or fifteen seconds, thirty at most.)

Add the squid to the simmering potato mixture.

Add a cup or two of small scallops, and a cup of small shrimp.

Cook a roux, equal parts butter and flour until the flour is golden-brown.

Add it to the simmering mixture and whisk to combine, and remove the heat.

Add 3/4 cup of heavy cream, or 1 1/2 cups of half and half.

Let stand for a bit, and serve.

Season with salt and pepper, and add a quarter cup of chopped fresh dill.

Simmer until warmed through again. Don't let the scallops overcook.

Let cool slightly

Boil 1 cup of water

Add 2 sticks of butter and let it melt completely

Remove the mixture from heat.

Add 1 cup of Glutino all-purpose gluten-free flour. Another mix with some bean flour might have better texture at the expense of flavor.

Add 1/2 teaspoon Xanthan Gum

Add 1 tablespoon tapioca flour

Beat and add three eggs, one at a time, incorporating completely.

The dough will start out the texture of mashed potatoes, but eventually become a soft, pliable consistency between dough and batter. Work the batter hard until it's completely smooth.

Heat oil for deep frying to 375 °F.

Fill a pastry bag with the dough, cut a 1/2" hole for the tip. Squeeze sticks or curls into the hot oil carefully.

Fry until golden.

From Patryk Zawadzki:

Here’s an idea for GNOME 3.x. Instead of showing a static wallpaper, start treating the wallpaper as an infinite plane. Basically instead of using a JPEG or PNG file as input, build a library that given a rectangle returns the image data (raster or even better vector) corresponding to the surface it covers. As monitors and workspaces come and go, the shell can expand and contract the background, calling the library as needed to build the missing parts.

Awesome! And parallax, multiple monitors. Great idea!

Mirrored from Aria's Blog.

Make the filling first. The cake has to be hot to roll around it.

Filling:

Blend 2 bananas, a can of coconut milk, 3 eggs, a little cinnamon and coriander.

Bake at 350 until set.

Cake:

Drop oven to 325.

Separate five eggs. Beat the whites into stiff peaks.

Blend three bananas, 2 tbsp coconut flour, 2 tbsp almond meal and the egg yolks until smooth.

Add 3/4 cup unsweetened coconut shred.

Fold the two parts together gently, trying not to destroy the loft of the egg whites

Pour onto a parchment lined sheet pan.

Bake until golden and egg has set.

Pull it out of the oven and immediately spread the custard over the surface, then roll the cake end over end. Put it seam side down on a tray. The cake will stay moist without any trouble or wrapping.

1 teaspoon coconut oil
1 can tomato paste

Fry the paste in the oil, keeping it moving as it starts to caramelize

1 cup pineapple juice
1 teaspoon guar gum

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon clove
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon hot paprika

a few drops of smoke flavor

toast 1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seeds, grind and add.

Cook stirring constantly, caramelizing as much as possible.

Adjust the amount of juice to get the texture right for ketchup. Dip things in it and pretend you'll have enough left to save for later.

1/4 cup peppermint leaves
1 small can diced tomatoes
1 small can tomato puree or crush.
1 tablespoon ras el hanout, or at least cumin, cinnamon and clove
salt and pepper to taste.

Cook in a pan greased with olive oil, letting it start to caramelize around the edges between stirs (it should look like "barely beginning to stick" each time, and have the pleasant hissing noise of fresh moisture hitting a hot pan as you stir.

Serve over cous-cous with meatballs.

1 eggplant, cut in 1/2 inch cubes
5 or 6 mushrooms, small dice
1 shallot or 1/3 red onion, chopped fine
1 tablespoon ras el hanout spice mix
garlic to taste

Sautee in olive oil (rather a lot -- a quarter cup or more is awesome)

Add a half can of diced tomatoes, and salt to taste. Sautee until starting to dry again.

Serve cold.

1 pound ground lamb, room temperature
1 egg, beaten
1/4 cup almond meal (optional, and bread crumbs would be fine if you're not being gluten-free)
2 tablespoons dried parsley
2 tablespoons dried peppermint (I stole it out of my tea jar)
1 or 2 tablespoons ras el hanout spice mix. (See below)
the zest from one lemon, chopped fine
one tablespoon fresh ginger root, chopped fine

mix ingredients gently, trying not to overwork the meat.

Pan-fry in a couple tablespoons of olive oil on all sides (6-10 minutes total or so), then bake at 200°F for 20 minutes.

Ras el hanout
There's no one perfect recipe, but mine was approximately equal parts of:

fresh toasted cumin seed, ground afterward
fresh toasted coriander seed, ground afterward
cinnamon
garlic powder
ginger root powder
paprika
mustard seed, toasted and ground

plus pinches of turmeric, clove and allspice, and a grating of nutmeg.

1/2 cup canola oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon lime juice
1 tablespoon ume plum vinegar
1 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon kelp granules
1 tablespoon dulse flakes
1-2 tablespoons brown rice syrup
4-5 cloves of garlic, chopped fine

Just mix and shake. The syrup and carageenan in the kelp together make a decent emulsifier, so this separates more slowly than other vinaigrettes.

Dr. Parkinson reimagines primary care

Inspired by Winnie The Pooh, by A. A. Milne

Make the vegan vanilla base cake recipe, and add toasted sesame seeds, toasted coconut, toasted poppyseeds, and whatever dried fruit you have handy. Bake as usual. Then turn out of the pan (upside-down), brush with honey or agave, and stick under the broiler briefly until a crisp crust develops.

1 cup white flour
⅔ cup whole wheat flour
½ cup sugar
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup water
⅓ cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vinegar
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredients. Add the remaining and beat until well blended. Pour into a greased 8 or 9-inch pan and bake at 350 °F for 30 to 40 minutes.

You can make a white cake by omitting the cocoa and using double the vanilla.

Makes an excellent base to make gingerbread cake, banana cake, marble cake (mix half cocoa and white cake batter in the pan, leaving a swirl), and it's the base for my Crustimony Proseed Cake.

I just created a drop-down menu with an option to add your own entries. Feel free to use.

The skinny. Demo.

I just asked my OpenSRS/Tucows domain reseller rep about AAAA (IPv6) glue records: They are planning to support them soon! In the mean time, they can configure them manually.

Finally there's a way to sync contacts out of AOL and into something free. Since AOL Sync is based on Funambol, it uses SyncML, and the Funambol clients.

You'll need Java, and then:

Download the Funambol Google Plug-In. If you want to sync into Outlook, use the AOL Sync client, or look at the other Funambol plug-ins for other systems.
Extract it, and run it — look in the funambol, pug-ins, then bin folders. The file is called "runGoogle.cmd" on Windows, and "runGoogle.sh" for Unix systems.
Go to Edit, then Communication Settings
Put in http://m.sync.aol.com/sync for the Server URL. Fill in your AOL username and password, and your Gmail username and password.
Hit OK
Hit Synchronize

Voila, your contacts are in Gmail

Say good-bye to a provider that has until now worked very hard on locking your contacts in.

Disability and class (Feministe), an excellent essay, starting off as personal touch and coming to some conclusions. The comments are good.

Presente is an organization, mostly latino, for immigration policy reform.

The Purity Myth (a book, read exerpt online with google). I'm inclined to agree that the notion of 'virginity' has to go away.

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(no subject)

1944 Red Velvet (cup) Cake

(no subject)

Cayenne and Sweet Onion Hot Sauce

Cephalapod Surprise Chowder

Gluten-free Crullers

A great idea

Gluten-free, fruit-sweetened coconut-banana custard roll cake

A fruit-sweetened ketchup recipe that will knock your socks off

Mint-tomato sauce

Cold eggplant and mushroom relish

Moroccan lamb meatballs

Sea Vegetable and Garlic Dressing

Great. Video. Great. Idea.

Crustimony Proseed Cake

Ann Swissdorf's Cocoa Cake (and a generally good vegan cake base recipe)

(no subject)

(no subject)

Syncing AOL contacts into Gmail (or other software)

A tumble on social issues

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March 2013

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